Could IBM's Millipede mean the end of dedicated PDAs and MP3 players for good?

Quite frankly, I'm ready to ditch the idea of owning a PDA or an MP3 player. After all, my phone (the one that's irradiating me as I sit here and write) goes everywhere with me and the only reason it doesn't function as my full-time PDA or MP3 player (or digital camera for that matter) is that it doesn't have the memory to host everything I'd want to stick on it (contacts, notes, music, podcasts, documents, e-mail, etc.

Quite frankly, I'm ready to ditch the idea of owning a PDA or an MP3 player. After all, my phone (the one that's irradiating me as I sit here and write) goes everywhere with me and the only reason it doesn't function as my full-time PDA or MP3 player (or digital camera for that matter) is that it doesn't have the memory to host everything I'd want to stick on it (contacts, notes, music, podcasts, documents, e-mail, etc.). I can't be alone in this thinking. Just today, news came out that there are at least 179,999,999 cell phone radiation absorbing souls in the U.S., in addition to me. Sure, as every year goes by, it feels like they (the proverbial "they" that is) are able to squeeze another order of magnitude of memory onto a Secure Digital (SD) or Compact Flash (CF) card. But those leaps in capacity have never been the sort of breakthrough increments that could turn an SD- or CF-sporting cell phone into a mean lean storage machine. And so, even when we have a gig of memory on our phones (thanks to an expansion slot), we take extra special care as to what goes into that memory. Bottom line? So far, there isn't a Treo or a PocketPC phone that rivals the iPod.

Perhaps IBM's Millipede will change that. According to a report by ZDNet UK's Dan Illet, IBM dazzled CeBIT attendees with a demonstration of the new MEMS-based storage technology that can fit 1 terabit of data per square inch, which nets out to the capacity of 25 DVDs fitting in an area